V2_AR: Artistic Explorations

This expert meeting brought together artists, developers and theorists to discuss what AR brings as a medium.

4

Jun 2010

13:00 to
18:00

location:
V2_, Eendrachtsstraat 10, Rotterdam

The first edition of the V2_AR Ecosystem event series explored the opportunities AR can give to artists. The expert meeting brought together artists, developers and theorists to discuss what AR brings as a medium. The goal of the afternoon was to come up with the right set of questions that can help guide the discussion about this upcoming technology and its use as an artistic tool.

The following speakers framed the discussion:

Julian Oliver, artist

Drawing from his experience as both programmer and artist, Julian outlined why a creatively rigorous future for Augmented Reality is dependent on Free and Open Source software, rather than third-party proprietary suites and solutions. Furthermore, he argued that developers need to help engender a healthy technical culture of exchange in order for the medium to remain both vital and in the hands of creators.

Margriet Schavemaker, Head of Collections at Stedelijk Museum, initiator of ARtours

In her talk Margriet hoovered inside the paradoxical relationship between art and technology.

Media art and culture are often considered highly significant in the process of making sense of new technologies that we are using in our daily lifes. Think for example of the countless references to Janet Cardiff's 'audio walks' or Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report (2002), made in our current effort to come to an understanding of AR technology. On the other hand, as Rosalind Krauss formulated it so well: media culture is not about the technology or the medium it deploys but most of all about the 'postmedium condition'. From this perspective the cords between culture and technology seem to be cut or at least framed as redundant.

Frans Vogelaar is partner of Hybrid Space Lab (Berlin), a R&D and design practice focusing on the hybrid fields that are emerging through the combination and fusion of environments, objects and services in the information/communication age. In 1998 Frans founded at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne the first Department of Hybrid Space worldwide.

AR is just one layer, a technique, a vector for starting creating a hybrid net, the integration of digital networks into physical objects, into the environment and its organisms. For the most part, these technological developments are commercially driven. Our interests and wishes are transformed into economically relevant 'needs', interactively developing us as consumers. We will be increasingly supported by information customisation through the selection of items "we are interested in." The consumer is taken care off - but what about our interest as citizens?

The following people applied to participate:

Hosting: Kwela Hermanns, Portal to Your Dreams

Jan Misker, projectmanager AR at V2_Lab

Carolien Teunisse, intern AR at V2_Lab

Mark Dek, Architect, Archadia/Waag Society

Gerwin de Haan, Postdoctoral Researcher, Delft University of Technology